• Electronic producer Clark has signed a new publishing deal with Decca. “I am very excited to start this new partnership with Decca Publishing”, he says. “Working together, we have agreed to take a fresh outlook on how we approach music publishing, what we can do to make the right kind of noise and stand out”.

• Django Django – or Double Django, as you insist on calling them for some reason – have released a video for ‘Surface To Air’, from their really very good new album ‘Marble Skies’.

• Andrew WK has, I have it on very good authority, released another new track ‘Ever Again’. If he hasn’t, I don’t know what this video I just watched was.

• You’re probably wondering if The Go! Team have released a video for ‘Mayday’. Well, yes, they have.

• The Damned have released a video for new single ‘Standing On The Edge Of Tomorrow’.

• Let’s Eat Grandma have released a new single, ‘Hot Pink’, which is produced by Sophie. The duo will play Lightbox in London on 8 Mar.

• Another hundred artists – yes, a hundred, I counted them – have been added to the line-up for this year’s Great Escape showcase festival. A number of new partnerships have been confirmed too, including with Gilles Peterson’s talent development programme Future Bubblers and the Download Festival, which will host a stage this year. Alongside all that, CMU Insights will also be presenting three full-day conferences for industry delegates once again. Info on the TGE line-up so far here. Info on the CMU Insights conferences here.

• Paul Simon has announced that he’ll play the British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park on 15 Jul. It’s being billed as ‘The Farewell Show’, so it could be his last ever performance. It’s also the last night of the festival, so maybe he’s just saying goodbye to the event.

• Gaz ‘Gareth’ Coombes has announced that he’ll be touring the UK in May. Good on you Gaz, I don’t care what they say.

• Already-mentioned-up-there-somewhere Sophie will play Heaven in London on 13 Mar. Tickets are on sale now.

• Glassjaw have announced that they will play Brixton Academy on 18 Aug. Tickets go on sale on 2 Feb.

• Justin Timberlake is performing at the BRITs. So are Ed Sheeran, Rag N Bone Man, Jorja Smith, Stormzy, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Foo Fighters and Rita Ora. BRITs boss Jason Iley has “no doubt that Justin’s performance will be one to remember”. Of course, following the controversy surrounding the Grammys, it may actually be remembered as the point in the show that people realised that the balance of male to female performers is pretty heavily off centre.

• I thought we’d decided who the sound of 2018 was going to be, but MTV has just announced that the winner of its annual Brand New prize is Mabel. “This year is going to be incredible”, she insists.

CMU’s Andy Malt and Chris Cooke review key events in music and the music business from the last seven days, including the disappointing end to Songkick’s long-running legal battle with Live Nation, the US government’s latest Notorious Markets report on online piracy, and how you can find musical inspiration by watching some people eat chicken. Setlist is sponsored by 7digital.

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]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/setlist-songkick-notorious-markets-nandos/feed/0China, AI and music education in the spotlight as CMU Insights returns to The Great Escapehttp://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/china-ai-and-music-education-in-the-spotlight-as-cmu-insights-returns-to-the-great-escape/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/china-ai-and-music-education-in-the-spotlight-as-cmu-insights-returns-to-the-great-escape/#respondThu, 18 Jan 2018 12:17:26 +0000http://www.completemusicupdate.com/?p=162733

Showcase festival The Great Escape has revealed information about this year’s convention for music industry delegates, including that CMU Insights will return with three full-day conferences putting the spotlight on China, AI and music education.

There will also be a high profile in-conversation programme, with Kobalt Music founder Willard Ahdritz already confirmed for that, plus TGE:DIY for future talent and the Courtroom Sessions from TGE’s industry partners.

CMU Insights has been presenting sessions at The Great Escape in Brighton each May since 2011, and introduced the unique full-day conference concept in 2015. By presenting a whole day of talks, interviews, case studies and discussions around a specific aspect of the music industry, these conferences can dig much deeper than other music business events, and also include aspects of CMU Insights’ training programmes and research projects.

For the first time this year, the TGE:CONVENTION will also kick off the day before the festival, on Wednesday 16 May, with the first of the CMU Insights conferences. That innovation comes as TGE also partners with the Unsigned Music Awards, which will take place in Brighton on that Wednesday evening.

The Education Conference on Wednesday 16 May will bring together music educators and music industry employers to discuss how to better prepare aspiring musicians and future music executives and entrepreneurs for a career in music.

The AI Conference on Thursday 17 May will look at the new technologies set to impact on the music business in the next decade, including the latest developments in audio-recognition, platforms for connecting with fans through messaging apps, and the machines that write music.

The China Conference on Friday 18 May will provide a substantial beginners guide to this key emerging market – with experts from China itself and leading European music executives already working there. Along the way the conference will cover copyright, streaming, social media and live opportunities.

All three CMU Insights conferences will be hosted by CMU’s Chris Cooke. Three speakers have already been announced for each conference, with many more to be confirmed soon. Organisations already taking part include Urban Development, Featured Artists Coalition, BIMM, Deviate, Mycelia, Reed Smith, IFPI, Outdustry and NetEase Cloud Music.

Commenting on all this, the boss of Great Escape owner MAMA, Rory Bett, says: “The programme we present for industry delegates at The Great Escape always breaks new ground, repeatedly putting the spotlight on the challenges and opportunities that will then dominate the conversation in the music industry in the year ahead”.

Honing in on this year’s conferences, he adds: “This year we’ll consider the future of music education; demo and discuss the new technologies that will drive the next phase of the industry’s development; and provide an insider’s guide to China, the emerging market which is becoming increasingly key for all of us in the music business”.

He concludes: “I’m also excited about the return of our TGE:IN-CONVERSATIONS programme, where we will be inviting some of the key players in the music industry to share both their journey so far and their thoughts for the future”.

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/china-ai-and-music-education-in-the-spotlight-as-cmu-insights-returns-to-the-great-escape/feed/0The Netherlands to be The Great Escape 2018’s featured countryhttp://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-netherlands-to-be-the-great-escape-2018s-featured-country/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-netherlands-to-be-the-great-escape-2018s-featured-country/#respondWed, 04 Oct 2017 11:49:05 +0000http://www.completemusicupdate.com/?p=159728

The Great Escape has announced The Netherlands as its featured country for 2018.

Working in partnership with Dutch Music Export, TGE will highlight rising music stars from the country. The first acts to be put in the spotlight are Naaz and Pitou, who will both play TGE’s ‘First Fifty’ shows in London, as well as performing at the festival itself.

“With Holland being the lead country at The Great Escape 2018, it’s very exciting to have this opportunity which enables me to represent my home at this wonderful event by simply playing my music”, says Pitou.

Dutch Music Export’s Rudd Berends adds: “Dutch Music Export is proud to be the focus country at TGE 2018. Our country has supported and attended TGE from year one with both the Dutch Impact Party and through various promotional support for our artists and industry. The UK is one of the most important countries for us to present the best the Lowlands has to offer and The Great Escape provides the best platform to showcase, support and promote Dutch musical talent to not only the UK but international music industries and audiences”.

Meanwhile, CEO of TGE owner MAMA, Rory Bett says: “We are THRILLED to shine a spotlight on one of our strongest most longstanding partners, The Netherlands. Since the birth of TGE in 2006 the DME has worked alongside us to bring the best Dutch artists to the festival, our convention and line-up has grown from strength to strength with their support and incredible music scene. 2018 is the perfect time to put the very best The Netherlands has to offer at the forefront of our festival!”

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-netherlands-to-be-the-great-escape-2018s-featured-country/feed/0CMU@TGE 2017: Will It Be Streams That Kill The Radio Star? http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/cmutge-2017-will-it-be-streams-that-kill-the-radio-star/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/cmutge-2017-will-it-be-streams-that-kill-the-radio-star/#respondTue, 04 Jul 2017 10:10:51 +0000http://www.completemusicupdate.com/?p=157101

Look out for more reports throughout July on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape in May. Today, the session in The Media Conference that asked “Will It Be Streams That Kill The Radio Star?”

Taking part in the discussion were Pete Downton, Deputy CEO of 7digital, a company that operates in both radio and streaming; BBC Radio 1 producer Kate Holder (pictured); Matt Deegan of radio company Folder Media and radio station Fun Kids; and Elijah Pailthorpe-Peart from Brighton’s own youth radio venture Platform B.

For all the talk of streaming companies becoming the record labels of the future, with their investment in curation and original programming, at the moment it looks more like the streaming firms are becoming the radio stations of the future. So, should traditional radio firms be worried? Could it be streaming that finally kills off the radio star?

The panel reckoned that on one level streaming was competing with radio, though on another level – for the time being at least – the services were complementary.

“People have only got so many hours in a day and days in a week”, Downton began, which means that “anything that grabs your attention is going to compete with something else that grabs your attention”.

Holder concurred: “Certainly, in terms of time available, streaming is absolutely a competitor to radio. Especially given that the young audience we’re going for at Radio 1 are so on it with technology. Anything that eats into their time is going to eat into the time they would spend listening to the radio”.

Deegan, with stats to hand, confirmed that it was with the youth demographic where streaming was starting to have an impact on radio’s audience figures. Though – as with audiences at large – it’s less about losing listeners outright, and more about having listeners tuned in for less hours each week. “If you look at 15-24 year old demographic” he said, “reach has dropped a little bit, not dropped a huge amount. It used to be 80%, now it’s about 75%. Where the bigger drop’s been is time spent”.

Even if listening hours are down, radio is still reaching much of its traditional audience, Downton reckoned, because – as it currently stands – what Spotify offers and what an FM radio station offers remain distinct.

“The streaming services as they are today, specifically Spotify as market leader, are so fundamentally different to radio that actually I think it’s a little bit early to start drawing really significant comparisons between the two”, he said. “Spotify, for a music fan like me, is amazing. But essentially it’s a utility in that it allows me to find music I want to find, and leverage algorithms and some curation to find something that’s a bit like it”.

For all the talk of streaming firms doing music discovery better, radio still has an edge in that domain, the panel reckoned. “I don’t see streaming as a full on competitor”, Holder said. “Because the sort of people who we are targeting with specialised music content are hopefully discovering new artists with us”. Which is to say, even for full on music fans, radio can provide discovery channels to inform listening on the streaming platforms.

And then, of course, there’s the more mainstream consumer, many of whom are yet to embrace streaming at all. “What really matters is the ‘passive massive'”, Downton agreed. “The mainstream consumers for whom music’s always been a part of their lives but they just don’t have the time to go and figure out how to use these new platforms”.

Despite some interesting innovations, the streaming services still need to evolve to truly engage that more mainstream audience. “I’m incredibly encouraged to find that streaming services are starting to pick up some tricks and pick up some talent from radio”, Downton added. “Anything that makes it more engaging and the experience deeper makes it more likely that people will fall in love with artists and music and spend more of their time doing it”.

Given that the big streaming platforms are in the scale business – and need further significant growth to become truly profitable – that more mainstream audience is of great interest to the digital firms, of course. Which means that the streaming platforms may seek to compete more head on with more traditional radio in the future.

“Some of them replicate what radio does”, Deegan said. “Some of them do it better than others. But they mostly misunderstand what radio is. Apple’s Beats 1 is a brilliant example. It’s a great radio station – the programming’s great, the producers are doing a great job, it’s brilliant. But no one listens to it and they don’t listen to it because it’s very difficult to consume it. It’s difficult to find it even though it’s free to use”.

One of radio’s strengths, Deegan added, is just how easy it is to find wherever you might be. “What a lot of the services forget is that we’re incredibly lucky in radio”, he said. “We’ve got to be careful not to forget what a brilliant position we’re in with devices, because everyone has a radio. Radio is in your smartphone, your TV, your car. So like a virus, we’ve managed to colonise lots of different places and that’s one of the reasons we do well. The difficulty, even for Apple with all of their money and all of their marketing skill, is to find an audience because actually they have poor distribution”.

That said, for millennials, many of whom are constantly connected to their portable devices, the ubiquity of radio is arguably less important. “We’re all connected, we’re all very much plugged in”, Pailthorpe-Peart agreed, speaking for that demographic. “So streaming services inevitably become the thing that you grab for first when you’re searching for new music. We know that YouTube is the number one tool for discovering music for the younger demographic”.

For younger consumers, content on demand can be key. “Millennials have this ‘want it now’ perspective, where we like things to be on demand”. To that end, he reckoned, younger listeners are more likely to connect with radio via its on demand platforms. “So, even if we are consuming FM radio, it might not be that we’re actually consuming it on FM, it might be that we’re consuming it on MixCloud or SoundCloud”.

Despite the millennial challange, Deegan remained optimistic, pointing out that the aforementioned ‘passive massive’ are yet to be convinced by subscription, while also seeking a service that just plays music with minimal involvement from the listener.

“The view is that the ‘passive massive’ aren’t necessarily going to go straight in for a subscription”, he said. “Also, a lot of radio’s audience very much want someone just to spoon-feed them a load of songs they’re familiar with. A lot of commercial radio’s success has been about playing the same songs over and over again to a similar audience. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s lots of radio stations that do lots of different things of course, but to get that Heart listener, to convert them into a Spotify subscriber, that’s a long journey”.

Actually, Deegan continued, if digital is a threat to radio, the threat is more likely about web giants competing for ad income than streaming firms competing for audience. “People moving budget from spending on radio or telly and moving that to spend on digital and online, that could be an issue”. That said, he added, commercial radio in the UK had its best year last year, “though that’s partly because of what Global and Bauer are doing in the marketplace”.

Either way, and despite the general optimism, the panel agreed that the radio industry needs to continue to innovate – partly by embracing online channels for its content, but also working out how to link those back to its core output.

Holder: “We know that our audience are completely at the forefront of new technology so we have to be there too, we have to be in the spaces where they are. It’s kind of expected that if we have a big guest, or an artist of note, that we wouldn’t just have them on the radio, that’s not really enough in 2017 for a young audience. We’ve gotta have a video to go with it, and some easy way to get that content straight away, without having to click too many times or having to discover it. That is where I think Beats 1 has gone a bit awry, because they’ve got some great stuff but it’s very difficult to find”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

We still have more reports to come on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, the big transparency debate that took place as part of The Royalties Conference.

The need for more transparency in the streaming business has been a hot topic at music conferences for a few years now. Labels, distributors, publishers and collecting societies initially agreed that there needed to be more transparency for artists, songwriters and their managers, and then started insisting that they were now becoming more transparent. Which in some ways some are, though – from an artist perspective – there is still much more to be done.

As was discussed at the CMU Insights Royalties Conference by artists Dave Rowntree, Crispin Hunt and Suzanne Combo (pictured), respectively representing the UK’s Featured Artist Coalition, the British Academy Of Songwriters Composes & Authors and the International Artists Organisation. Annabella Coldrick from the Music Managers Forum provided a management perspective.

‘Transparency’ is a wide-ranging term, which can in itself be a problem. Tackling issues around transparency requires music creatives and their managers to be much more specific about what streaming information they feel they need and should have access to. At a basic level, it’s useful to distinguish between usage data, royalty data and deal information.

It’s usage data where most progress has been made to date, by both majors and independents. Hunt noted that he had explored the portals both Sony Music and Universal Music have developed to share usage stats from the streaming platforms with their artists, and that they both provide “a great deal of really useful information”, particularly when it comes to geographical data – where people are streaming your music – which can inform an artist’s live activity.

But even with usage data, it is still early days. Advances are being made all the time in this domain, Hunt accepted, “but I think there’s a lot more that could be done with this kind of data and how it is passed through to artists”.

The panel agreed that the digital platforms themselves had an important role to play here as well, in that they needed to further refine what data they provide to the labels, distributors, publishers and societies. And then the music companies need to further refine how they compile that data and share it with their artists and writers.

“We know Spotify provides a lot of good data”, Coldrick said, noting that it also provided artists and managers with some of that information direct via its Spotify For Artists platform. “I think Apple Music provides quite a bit of usage data too, but not necessarily so much detail, to the same level of granularity. With some of the other digital services, the data coming through is even more difficult to analyse”.

Of course both labels and artists want access to the best possible data from the digital platforms – which is to say enough detail to be able to see trends and inform marketing and business decisions, but not so much detail it’s impossible to navigate. So, where the weaknesses are actually with the platforms, if labels and artists could agree on how they would like to see usage data provision evolve, they could together put pressure on the streaming services to improve things their side.

Artist and managers could also put pressure on the streaming platforms to develop services akin to Spotify For Artists, so that they aren’t reliant on their labels and distributors to pass the data through. Though, at the same time, it’s useful to be able to see data from all the digital platforms side by side, which is where the good label and distributor data portals come into their own.

However, most managers will inevitably have artists working with different labels and distributors, meaning they are having to use multiple portals, in addition to any of the data channels provided by the streaming services themselves. And one of the problems is that there are no real data standards yet.

“The general problem here is that this is the Wild West at the moment”, reckoned Rowntree. “We’re in the very early days of all of this and so everybody is reporting different things in different ways. There’s no standardisation. It’s very hard to create useful tools without standards that are going to work on platforms across the board”.

“That will happen”, he added. “History shows us that the individual organisations will resist standards tooth and nail because they have a better idea, but it will be forced on everybody sooner or later”. Though, stressing once again that it was still early days for the streaming business, he reckoned that could be a decade away.

While Rowntree agreed that the way labels and distributors are presenting usage data is improving, he felt that some business partners are still holding some key data back. But not necessarily because ‘data is power’, possibly more for paternal reasons.

“You have an ongoing tug of war”, he said. “From artists and managers saying ‘it’s our data as much as it’s yours, tell us’, and the business partners going ‘no, I must protect you from all of this data; you won’t be able to understand it; you’ll be deluged’. But they forget, with the younger artists and managers, they’re 20 years old and know exactly how to deal with large amounts of data, and they are kind of laughing at this idea that they need to be protected from it”.

Nevertheless, with usage data there does seem to be a general willingness among labels, distributors, publishers and societies to share the information with their artists and songwriters. The question is whether they are able to share that data in a thorough but usable way.

Which comes down to what the streaming services are doing, what resources the business partners have to build their own portals, and the need for some standards across the industry. Though artists could and should be involved more in these conversations, rather than just suddenly being presented with a finished portal.

But while usage data is great, what about the money? What about royalty reporting? Again, portals are being built and some progress is being made, though standards vary hugely across the industry, and even the best could be better.

Says Combo: “Often you are told what you have earned from a service, but you don’t see the basis of the label’s calculation. You have no idea if any deductions have been applied, and if so, why they have been applied. You need to see everything that has happened at the label to the money it was paid by the streaming service”.

The complexities of record contracts – and especially older record contracts – make royalty reporting more confusing. If an artist is on a straight 18% royalty, then the label’s financial reporting portal could simply state what it received from a streaming service in one column, and then what the artist is receiving – ie 18% of the original figure – in the next column. And some labels do just that.

However, with some record contracts, and especially older record contracts, there are other complications which aren’t always clearly set out in royalty statements. Hunt explained: “I signed a deal in the 1990s. It was quite a good deal for the time, paying a 17% royalty. But then there are deductions. There is a TV advertising deduction, which can be applied forever because we were once briefly advertised on the television. That takes my royalty down to 8.5%”.

“Then there’s an international deduction. It’s not clear how that applies on streaming. But there’s a rumour that it applies because the servers of Spotify are based in Sweden. I’ve asked my label about that and they say ‘oh, we’ll have to have a look into that’. There was also a 25% packaging deduction in the contract. Does that apply? I worked out that, with all the deductions, in the end I’d be on about a 1.7% royalty. Which is only 0.7% better than Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker”.

“In their defence, the record company has said ‘no no no, we don’t apply those kind of deductions to even legacy contracts on digital'”, Hunt went on. “But it’s really hard to find out exactly what’s going on, because it’s not clearly shown in the royalty reporting”. Which is to say, the label isn’t showing all of its workings out.

Though even where business partners are clearer on how they have worked out what an artist is due – or an artist has a simpler contract where the headline royalty is always applied – there remains the third transparency issue: artists don’t know how the streaming services worked out what to pay the label, distributor, publisher or society, because they don’t know the revenue share and minimum guarantee arrangements between their business partners and the streaming firms. Nor if the label is seeing any other kickbacks like equity, advances, fees or marketing support.

“If somebody is profiting off the exploitation of my music, it seems to me equitable and just that I should share in that”, stated Rowntree. “That’s a fundamental red line for me. If somebody’s being offered equity in exchange for my music being licensed to their service, I want my share of that. And if somebody’s being paid an advance on the royalties that are due to me, I want my share of that advance”.

The labels, distributors, publishers and societies often claim that they can’t share deal information with artists and songwriters because of non-disclosure agreements in their contracts with the streaming services. Rowntree: “It just seems to me that this idea that all this information is hidden behind NDAs, which I’m not allowed to penetrate, is deliberately obstructing my ability to check that what I’m being paid is correct. I don’t see that there’s any other industry on earth that would put up with this”.

One justification for the NDAs is that if the rates received by the labels et al were public domain, it would limit the ability of an artist’s business partners to get the best possible deal. Hunt conceded that this was a valid point, citing the example of two PRS streaming deals he had knowledge of as a board member of the society.

Still, the industry needs to bring artists and songwriters into the NDAs, Hunt added. “We’ve got to work out some way that the artists – or the people who have an interest in their work – can have some kind of penetration into the streaming deals; but we might have to sign NDAs at the same time. There has to be some way of doing that”.

Combo agreed: “We need to know that we are part of the investment. We deserve better treatment and better confidence from the labels, and from the collecting societies. We need to reconsider our relationships – we, the artists, are business partners of the music companies. And we are able to keep secrets if necessary”.

“These structures are already in place”, Rowntree reckoned. “When you send a representative into audit your major label company – to audit the royalties you have been paid – they already sign an NDA, so this already happens. These people should be able to then see and check the streaming deals. I don’t actually want to know the percentages, I don’t want the data myself. I just want to be satisfied that the accountancy firm that works for me is happy that things are going OK”.

Though Coldrick expressed one concern with artists – or auditors working for artists – signing NDAs with the labels. It’s usually bigger name artists who can afford to audit their business partners. If they find a problem with the streaming royalties they are receiving, the label often does a deal with the artist on the condition they don’t speak about the issue publicly. But the issue might be affecting all artists.

Coldrick: “If what you find is a big structural problem at the label, how do we fix that problem? Because what they’ll do, is they’ll do a deal with you, you’ll get paid, then you’re quiet. But what if the problem is affecting every single other artist on that label – the problem is, you don’t know. If you can’t expose or share those problems with the wider artist community, then you can’t fix the long term structural problems”.

While with usage data, there seems to be a general willingness across the industry to share information – the issues are ability, resource and standards – with royalty data and deal information it’s less clear cut. On the latter point, the majors in particular remain resistant to becoming truly transparent. So much so that the MMF, FAC and BASCA – along with the Musicians’ Union and Music Producers Guild – earlier this year called on the government to intervene.

“I don’t think anyone initially wants to leap to politicians to find a solution”, Coldrick stated. “Often that’s the very last resort, having to go into Parliament and say ‘actually there’s a really big problem here, it’s structural’. But we’ve tried, all our industry organisations have spent at least a year and a half – nearly two years – trying to negotiate a voluntary code of conduct by which all these issues would be resolved”.

“If you’re trading in an artist’s catalogue then you should have to be open and transparent about how you’re trading”, she went on. “You shouldn’t do deals that are against the interests of those that are creating the music that you’re exploiting. After a year and a half, we haven’t been able to find a voluntary solution to these issues that every label and publisher can sign up to, which is why we reached out to government”.

Hunt added: “There’s a big conversation that goes on within the music industry about ‘oh we don’t want interference, we don’t want regulatory interference with contracts between individuals’. But the truth of this is that it’s not contracts between individuals, it’s often a contract between four or five nineteen year old kids and a huge global corporation, and they can only rely on their lawyer, who has to do loads of deals with Universal. That’s not a contract between individuals”.

“We should not forget, and neither should the copyright industries forget, that copyright is itself a regulation”, Hunt went on. “Intellectual property is a regulation and it requires government to keep an eye on it. It’s a government’s duty to keep an eye on their regulations and how their regulations are employed. I think it’s utterly necessary for government to step in”.

This has already happened in France. Combo, who is also involved in the French version of the FAC, explained that a French government review of copyright law put the idea of a compulsory licence for streaming on the table, which could in turn secure artists both transparency and a better split.

A compulsory licence is the last thing labels and publishers want. “That’s why we succeeded in getting every stakeholder around the table to negotiate a voluntary code of practice”, Combo said. “Without this legal threat, it would have been impossible. We then negotiated long and hard, and signed a code two years ago”.

Many would argue that a compulsory licence would ultimately push the royalties paid by streaming services down, which isn’t in the interests of artists either, though the prospect of such an arrangement got talks going on a more proactive basis. Work relating to that code – on transparency and remuneration – is still very much ongoing, so in practical terms it is still to be seen if the French scheme delivers the goods.

Beyond the UK and France, transparency is also on the agenda in the wider European Union, with an article of the draft European Copyright Directive attempting to provide artists and songwriters with new rights to find out how their music is being exploited. It’s a good start, though Coldrick expressed concerns that the current draft provides too many get outs. And, of course, in the UK it’s still not clear whether the new European Copyright Directive will be implemented here.

Plus, Coldrick said, better transparency is just step one. “It would be great if we could get some decent transparency, but what if – as a result of that – an artist finds out they are being ripped off. Or – more importantly – they aren’t technically being ripped off, legally speaking, but they are being paid on very unfair terms, maybe with deductions from the physical era still being applied to streams. It’s all very well being able to see that better, but it’s then what can you actually do about it?”

The aforementioned copyright directive tries to deal with that too via a thing called the ‘contract adjustment mechanism’. Coldrick said: “Again, we don’t think the EU contract adjustment mechanism does what we would like it to do, but we would like to see some way to have the right for artists to review their old deals – to say are these terms modern and fair? So if those deductions are being applied, there’s a formal system to say ‘hang on a minute, this is outdated, it’s not right’, and to fix it”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, the latter half of the sync-focused session in The Royalties Conference.

Sync is a big topic for discussion at most music conferences these days, of course. So much so that it would be easy to think that the synchronisation of music to movies, TV, games and ads – and the licensing income it generates – is the most lucrative part of the music rights business. It’s not. Indeed, for the record industry it’s a very small part of the business indeed (2% worldwide). But it’s more important for the music publishers, and most important for those songwriters who are not also performers.

Who negotiates the sync deals for those songwriters and how do the deals work though? Those were the questions posed to Simon Pursehouse from Sentric Music and Ros Earls from 140db, who managers artists, songwriters and producers, in the second part of the sync session during the CMU Insights Royalties Conference.

“The songwriting world has become massively over-saturated”, Earls noted, explaining why sync can be such an important part of the business for the songwriters and producers she works with, there being less opportunities to write hits for other artists, and those occasional hits often being less lucrative in the streaming age. “It’s getting tougher and tougher to make a living as a songwriter, and as a record producer too. Getting a sync can really save your bacon”.

Which is why music publishers make such a big deal about their sync teams, and why a publisher’s ability to secure sync and original commission opportunities is an important consideration when a songwriter is deciding which publisher to ally with. The opportunity for future sync deals is “always a big part of a publisher’s pitch”, Earls confirmed, though she cautioned, “there’s no guarantee of any of it”.

This may be because the publisher isn’t quite as committed to finding a writer sync deals as they claim – especially if they are repping a large repertoire. Or it might simply be because, as with everything, but even more so with sync, there’s a ‘right time right place’ element to it all.

Either way, a good manager, when working with someone who primarily writes or producers music, rather than performing, should also be seeking opportunities for their clients in the sync space. Earls has lots of contacts in the sync business, and is often being pitched to by sync agencies, though – she stressed – the more people who get involved in the deal-making, the more people taking a cut of the money before it reaches the writer.

“In America, there are huge sync agencies pitching all of the time”, she said. “But obviously they’re taking another slice of the money – in addition to the publisher taking their cut. It’s great to be pitched too of course”, she added. “And those deals are particularly attractive for writers who are self-published and in control of their own copyrights. But if you’re published, then the writer is basically going to end up paying twice”.

Of course, having multiple parties each taking a cut is less of an issue if – through those different entities being involved – you score a particularly valuable deal. “It depends on the return”, Earls said on whether published writers should also work with sync agencies. “If you’re looking at a Disney sync, or you’re looking at a Netflix programme, another 20% [commission] might not matter that much. You’ve got to weigh all that stuff up”.

Quite how sync income is shared is important to consider when negotiating a publishing deal, Pursehouse added. “Definitely be aware that if you’re going to do a deal with any label or publisher, you should include both a procurement and a non-procurement rate on sync”, he said. “That means that if they pitch your song and get you that deal, they can take their full commission. But if the writer secures the deal – directly or via another agent – then the publisher should take a lower cut, maybe an administration fee”.

Earls agreed that its important to structure publishing deals in that way, though added that, with self-procured sync deals, “you have to prove that you secured the deal, and it can be quite tricky getting into who did what”.

On the songs side, sync deals usually come in two parts. First there is the deal that allows the licensee to actually synchronise the song into their video. Any TV company which then broadcasts the finished product, or cinema which screens it, then needs a separate licence to cover the ‘communication’ or ‘performance’ of the finished work. Outside of TV, the first part of the arrangement is usually a direct deal between writer/publisher and the licensee. The second element is handled by the collecting society – so PRS in the UK.

If a finished work is likely to be broadcast or screened on a regular basis, resulting in regular PRS income, does that mean you’ll accept a lower rate at the outset? “It depends on the artist really”, said Earls. “If you’re an artist that’s used to a certain level of income, and you want to sustain your livelihood, you’re thinking more about the long term. But at the same time, you also need to consider your worth in the marketplace, you don’t want to cutting the value of what you do, which you might by accepting the lower fee”.

When it comes to the direct sync deals – rather than those covered by collective licensing – the money on offer varies hugely. The writer’s status is a key factor, but so is the budget that the licensee has access to. The licensee will also often talk up the promotional value of a writer’s music being synced, though that is only really true for songwriters who are also performers, and who have an artist brand to promote and fanbase to build.

Therefore artists and writers need to decide which deals work for their situation. At Sentric, Pursehouse works with lots of artists at the start of their careers. Earlier he recalled how: “We were presented with one deal – for a year-long UK ad campaign – offering the band £3000, which is terrible money. I said to the artist, ‘this is bad money – I would say no to this if it was up to me’. But for the band, it was their first ever single, it bought them a van and they were really chuffed”.

He added: “Ultimately it’s their choice. I’m never going to say no to money when it’s an artist livelihood at stake. We can give advice, we can tell them what they should do, but ultimately you put the facts in front of them, give them your recommendation, and if they say ‘yes’, that’s cool. We’re simply there to facilitate and add value”.

In addition to securing sync deals for existing songs and recordings, there is also the business of original commissions of course, that can be even more lucrative. Though Earls noted that you need to build a decent profile in that space to really see the opportunities.

That said, Earls knows first hand how valuable those opportunities can be when they really work, she having worked with Paul Oakenfold when he got the ‘Big Brother’ theme commission from TV company Endemol. “They came to us to commission the music. That was one of those really big moments, because the show was then franchised around the world and it just kept on going, it was the gift that kept on giving”.

“They didn’t do a buyout on that, did they?” Pursehouse interjected. “So they must have had to relicense it every season”. Earls confirmed that was so. “It was a really good deal, and it’s still going”.

Who gets to own the copyright when TV, movie, gaming or ad companies commission original works is a contentious issue, with more and more production companies and brands seeking to take control of the copyrights their commissions create, which basically means they become the publisher of the music. The writer will get future royalties – certainly their cut of anything collected by PRS – but won’t control the work.

“They might give you a flow through of any subsequent income”, Earls said of those deals. “But they won’t let you hold on to the copyright”. Those deals are particularly tricky for published writers, she added, because the writer’s publishing deal means they couldn’t automatically sign up to a commission that includes a ‘buyout’.

Which again means that songwriters who see sync and original commissions as being key to their businesses need to consider all the implications when signing a publishing contract. Though get yourself a ‘Big Brother’ style deal, and all that time sorting out the technicalities and paperwork will be worth it.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, A Recent History Of Getting High.

While the latter half of the CMU Insights Drugs Conference looked at addiction and recovery, the first part of the day considered drug taking at music events, and drugs as part of clubbing culture. To inform that debate, host Jen Long spoke to Mixmag Editor Duncan Dick about recent trends in drug use amongst clubbers, including stats from the Global Drug Survey – a project originally started as a Mixmag feature two decades ago and now a major independent operation surveying global trends in drug use.

“We started the drugs survey at Mixmag around the late 90s”, Dick explained. “At that time, dance music was a subculture, and a subculture that was built around ecstasy. We were really the only people documenting that culture so it was really important to us to reflect what was going on”.

“We’ve always seen ourselves as telling the truth about drugs”, he added. “Drugs are completely linked to dance music, from the people that make it to the people that dance to it. I’m not saying that everybody involved in dance music is on drugs, but it’s definitely part of the culture. A lot of people would like drugs to go away, but they’re not going to go away. And as journalists, as dance music lovers, we’d like to report on the world as it is rather than the world that someone would like it to be”.

The Global Drug Survey defines clubbers as people who have been clubbing in the last three months. Reviewing the 2016 figures, Dick said: “It will not shock you to know that the most popular drug amongst clubbers is ecstasy. And ecstasy use has been growing year-on-year over the last five years”.

“Ecstasy is more fashionable than it has ever been, in my opinion”, Dick continued. “And cocaine is up as well”. Those trends might surprise people, given all the media attention enjoyed by so called legal highs in recent years, and the subsequent crackdown on such substances in the UK last year.

“Nitrous was massive in 2016”, Dick added, of the substances that fell under the ‘legal high’ banner, “but I don’t know whether the new laws will have an affect on that”.

One of the legal highs that was particularly newsworthy for a time was mephedrone aka Meow Meow. “Mephedrone seems to have died a death and that is mainly because pills got stronger”, Dick revealed. “It’s almost as if the cartels that make MDMA – that’s probably some Dutch guys on a farm in Utrecht – got to together and thought, ‘well, this is killing our market, we’ve got to compete with these labs in China’. The quality of MDMA has gone up massively in the last few years [and] that was a direct response to the popularity of mephedrone”.

Increasing the strength of drugs does tend to increase their popularity, Dick confirmed, adding that: “The stronger the drugs, the more people report having a good time on them, so the more likely people are to take them. I would certainly say that more people are taking MDMA now, in the form of pills or powders, than they were six or seven years ago when pills were £2 a pop but they were 2% pure”.

Drugs getting stronger makes them more dangerous if people continue to consume them at the same quantity – not realising a pill now contains much more of the actual drug. With poor drugs education, and a lack of good information of legal highs let alone illegal drugs, that creates a risky situation that can be fatal.

“There’s a huge void in drug education at the moment”, Dick said. Reckoning that bad drugs education was as much about a lack of funding as it was a nervousness among the powers that be about being seen to condone drug taking, he continued: “That’s combined that with a generation of millennials that started taking mephedrone because they assumed it was safe, because no one knew anything about it, because it was easy to get. And now they’re now moving onto illegal drugs with little information about them. It’s a perfect storm”.

Mixmag has attempted to fill the drugs education void where possible, he said. Last year the magazine ran the ‘Don’t Be Daft, Start With A Half’ campaign, after there was “a rash of people having convulsions, overheating” due to taking “super-strong pills”. This kind of editorial, of course, means adopting an approach some people consider controversial, ie taking drug consumption at clubbing events as read, and talking about how to take drugs safely, rather than insisting that drugs should just be avoided.

Dick is an advocate of other media and the music industry embracing this approach. “I think festivals and clubs really have a moral responsibility to step in here and, instead of chasing people around with aggressive bouncers, to try to educate folk on how to take drugs safely. To support campaigns like ours. And to talk about this work openly”.

“The truth is, you’re not going to change people’s behaviour by simply heightening security”, he went on. “It’s just not going to work. Look at the sad deaths around Fabric recently – one of those kids took their pills outside the club. What’s the club supposed to do about that? The only way you can save lives is by education”.

The government should also be playing a more proactive role here, he added: “It would be nice to see the government spending a little bit of money on education campaigns. Talk To Frank is a website and a couple of flyers in a club”.

He continued: “It’d be nice to see a bit more engagement with the clubbing community and with the people that own venues especially. With the Lib Dem manifesto, there was talk of putting responsibility for drugs under the Department Of Health again. Just that kind of mindset, where we’re talking about protection and education rather than trying to lock people up, I think would make a massive change”.

“Drugs are getting stronger and people need to take responsibility for their own actions, but they also need to have the full information at their fingertips”, he concluded, encouraging clubbers to seek out as much information as they can. “There’s a lot more drug checking and drug purity testing available. I would urge people to take full advantage of them”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here. Since The Great Escape, the 2017 Global Drugs Survey has been published, which you can read here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, the MEGS Guide To Exporting New Talent.

Funded by the Department For International Trade and administered by the BPI, the Music Export Growth Scheme aims to support independent British artists who have gained momentum in the UK and who are ready extend that success overseas.

Chris Tams from the BPI provided a beginners guide to the scheme as part of the CMU Insights Export Conference – reported on here – while three artist managers also spoke about their respective work with three artists who had received MEGS funding to help them with marketing and touring activity in new markets. Samantha Smith from Fairsound Management spoke about her work with LoneLady, David Manders (pictured) from Liquid Management about Public Service Broadcasting and Phil Middleton from ATC about The Temperance Movement.

LoneLady received MEGS funding to support international marketing around the release of her second album ‘Hinterland’ in 2015. It was the second time manager Smith had applied to the funding scheme on behalf of LoneLady, the first application not being successful. “We just had more traction in the UK”, Smith said, explaining why she thought the second application received funding. “It’s really part of the MEGS approach that there should be traction and success in the UK that the artist can build on abroad”, she added.

Public Service Broadcasting manager Manders agreed that this was a key element of the MEGS scheme. “We did very well off the first EP in the UK. We were just approaching Forum-level venues as far as the live shows go, and the band’s first proper album, ‘Inform Educate Entertain’, came out and went into the charts at 21. That was the point when we thought, we have a good business in the UK now, let’s start thinking about international and growing things”.

Bands need to ultimately think internationally, Manders added, if they are looking to enjoy a long career making music. But taking those first steps into new markets can be tricky and risky – especially for independent artists and labels operating on tight margins – which, of course, is why MEGS was created. The timing of the scheme’s launch worked well for Public Service Broadcasting, with Manders noting that “we were actually one of the acts supported by the first round of MEGS funding”.

Of course, for artists, international expansion is partly about boosting record sales and streams, but it is also about building greater demand for live shows, so that an artist can be touring for more of the year. Different artists will have different priorities. For The Temperance Movement, manager Middleton always saw the key opportunities as lying within the live sphere.

“The Temperance Movement are a rock n roll band”, he said. “They’re a live band. They record music yes, and they sell records, yes. But they’re a classic ‘tickets and t-shirts’ band. That’s what they do, that’s who they are, that’s the work ethic that will sustain their career”.

Therefore what the band needed MEGS support for most was to expand the reach of their European touring activity, to find a live audience in more places, which would enable the band to play more gigs each year in the long term.

The funding was used for simple practical things. “The additional funding meant the band could afford something like a tour bus”, Middleton said. “That tour bus meant we could play not just capital cities – not just four or five shows in total – but we could now make a 35 date tour a realistic prospect, and for a band like The Temperance Movement, that was what they needed”.

The strategy seemingly worked, with the band’s European audience growing as they toured. “Their tour went from being 150-cap shows to 500 and continues to rise”, said Middleton. And there were other benefits too. “They picked up a new German promoter on the tour, who also happens to book the Stones” he added. “Once the band had a working relationship with that promoter, we got support slots at the four Stones shows in Europe. Which was a godsend because of the PRS cheque that came with those performances. The performing right royalties from playing those support slots were in six figures, and that kept the band in business for the next two years”.

Finding the right business partners abroad is key to artists enjoying success in new markets, and MEGS funding often allows acts to build those partnerships. For those artists working with independent labels, that might be about allowing those record companies to dedicate more time and resource via their local offices in other markets, or it might be about hiring local suppliers, especially in marketing and PR.

Public Service Broadcasting released their album via their own label, so they had to find those business partners abroad from scratch. Manders said: “It was phone friends, ask people, who do you use in the territory? Get on the phone, speak to them. For years, I’ve done quite a lot of the music conferences, in various countries, so I’ve got to meet a fair few internationals over that time. Speak to those people, ask them, get advice. It’s a lot of trial and error”.

LoneLady is signed to Warp, so Smith could work with the label on securing expertise. The record company had its own people in some places, and even where they decided to hire external PR agencies to boost media exposure, “Warp were able to help us with that”, Smith said. “Because they had people they had worked with before”.

Though once those local business partners are on board – whether label, promoter or PR/marketing agencies – the manager still needs to stay on top of all the activity, and make sure everyone is working in sync. Another challenge for management and the key business partners is deciding with new markets to prioritise, especially in an era where you tend to release every new record globally on the same day, rather than staggering the release country by country.

Manders: “With this worldwide release thing in the digital age, everything goes live at the same time worldwide. But you can’t be in every country at the same time. That can be frustrating. It was actually nice when you could go: ‘Right we won’t release in Germany yet, we won’t release in Australia yet, let’s wait until we can get into the market and then there will be more attention on the band’. Because you will definitely make a bigger impact – and likely get much better media support – when you are actually on the ground in each territory”.

Smith agreed. If you get media support in a country, or traction on the streaming platforms there, you want to capitalise on that momentum, and the best way to do that is to go there. But at the same time, management and label need to properly weigh up the relative merits of every opportunity. “It’s exciting to get offered support slots in Spain and to go and play with a band for four days”, she said. “But it might ultimately cost you £5000 and, actually, is it the right thing to be doing at that time? You could stay in the UK and make an amazing video that will have impact everywhere”.

Even with the streaming services possibly allowing you to get more traction in more markets more quickly, taking an artist international is still a long-term project. “Definitely when you start to go into international, you really have to be committed long-term, there’s no short fix involved in it at all”, Manders said. “We never expected ‘oh right, we’ll get this MEGS funding, we’ll be massive in America, it’ll all be fine and we won’t need anything again’. It’s really about trying to develop something over the next ten years. You can’t spread yourself too thinly, you have to pick your markets carefully. You have to go there at the right time”.

To that end MEGS isn’t expecting overnight success, though as Tams explained when outlining the programme during the Export Conference, the scheme is all about return on investment, on ultimately growing the international businesses of UK artists, and in doing so benefiting the British economy.

“This isn’t an arts fund, it’s a business fund”, Manders noted. Return on investment is key, for that artist as well as the funder though. Middleton: “We did a couple of applications that we actually scrapped at the last minute. We’ve gone through them and thought, ‘Jeez, the return on this investment is not worth it. It’s the wrong time, wrong place, wrong act, wrong everything. We’re not going to do it’. And actually scrapped the activity”.

“MEGS is not free money”, Manders also noted. “It’s there to support you and help with your growth and export. You still have to put 30% in yourself. It’s not cheap. You need a good home business as well”.

In terms of securing MEGS funding – it’s a very competitive scheme – as well as picking the right project for the right artists at the right time, putting some effort into the application is also key. Manders: “Our budgets were very precise, we knew exactly what we were going to be spending on a radio plugger, on a press officer, a little bit of tour support, even bits of advertising, some digital marketing”.

He added: “Probably about 80% of the people we were going to work with, we already knew who we were going to use, so we could provide a CV for each of them, so the MEGS panel could say ‘yeah, OK, they’ve got good people in the market that really understand what they’ve doing. And they’ve thought it through properly'”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, part two of a session from the Media Conference titled The Crisis In Music Journalism.

In part one of this session looking at the state of music journalism in 2017, the panel of music journalists – Laura Snapes, Emily Jupp, Greg Cochrane and Mark Savage – considered the commercial pressures faced by music media today, and the impact that has on those pursuing a career writing about music.

The panel then discussed the different kinds of content music journalists create – whether the good old review is even necessary in an era when readers can immediately listen to a new album or track themselves, and whether the growth of music news reporting was a good thing – before asking whether the rise of digital media had brought to an end a golden age of music journalism.

“I think reviews have a different role from 20 years ago”, Jupp reckoned, acknowledging the fact that there was now a much higher chance a reader had already heard any track or album being reviewed. But, while you don’t need a reviewer to explain what a record sounds like anymore, the review still added something, she said. “You might read a journalist’s reviews just to understand what they’re seeing in an album, which might not be what you’ve heard in the first listen, second listen, or the 20th”.

You don’t need a reviewer to tell you a record is out – a simple news story, probably with a SoundCloud or YouTube embed, does that – but a review can provide background, context and alternative opinions. “I suppose we are talking about two types of journalism”, she added. “One that’s longer form and more about the quality of the writing, and one that’s bish-bash-bosh ‘this is out there now, go listen now’. Both have their value, but I think they’re quite different types of journalism”.

Although agreeing that reviews still had their place, Savage reckoned that the pressure for publications to get their critiques online quickest could have an impact on the quality or nature of the review. “The amount of time you get to live with an album before you review it has shrunk”, he said. “Even though immediate opinions often don’t count as much. The best pieces I read about Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ last year were published in December, because people had time to absorb it, to think about what it meant for Black America, for female musicians as a whole, and that sort of review I am really interested in. I don’t know how much the general public is though, because I’m a music nerd!”

Which is an interesting point. Reviews remain popular for core music fans, and music journalists like writing them, but do they have mainstream appeal? “I spoke to the editor of a national newspaper before I came here”, Savage revealed. “He said when he’s looking to cut costs, the first thing he wants to cut is the reviews. But, he said, ‘the music writers then rise up in arms and say NO, this is absolutely what we want to do’, and so, to keep those writers happy, to get the other content that actually does shift newspapers, you have to let them keep on doing it”.

Savage added that, although when the BBC News website publishes reviews they do well in terms of traffic, generally they don’t do as well “as interviews and other more analytical features”.

While that may be true for non-specialist media, Cochrane said he thought reviews were more important for specialist music titles, especially those with a focus on artists and genres not getting covered by more mainstream media outlets.

“From a Loud & Quiet point of view, we kind of exist in a music ecosystem where reviews are still important because we write about artists that may only get reviewed in one or two places”, he said. “It doesn’t really matter that we didn’t review Harry Styles’ album. Nobody needs another opinion on that. We’d rather give four pages to Wesley Gonzalez and talk about why we think he’s interesting”.

Though – referencing his time at NME – Cochrane conceded that when it comes to online, music news is probably the key content type, something that has risen in importance as music media has shifted from print to digital. “When I was running NME.com the absolute core of what we were doing was based on news”, he said. “And there was a huge appetite for it – that was justified by the stats”.

There is undoubtedly more music news available now than ever before, on music and entertainment sites, and more generalist online news outlets too. Though that doesn’t necessarily mean there is more original music news reporting, Snapes noted.

“There’s unfortunately little budget for actual reporting”, she said. “For example, the PWR BTTM story that’s been going on for the last few weeks. 95% of the reporting on that has just been rehashing Facebook posts and rehashing statements from the label”.

“Those statements are obviously important things that need to get out there”, she continued. “But I’ve only seen two organisations, including Jezebel, that have actually gone and done original reporting on it. So, they have actually spoken to the victims and spoken to the bands who were due to be supporting on the PWR BTTM tour which has now been cancelled and fallen apart”.

“It’s really unfortunate that original reporting is so undervalued”, she continued. “You’re not going to define an agenda by being the first person to report that ‘BEYONCE HAS POSTED A VIDEO’. You’re going to define the agenda by doing the report that then everybody else copies and links back to”.

Nonetheless, despite the commercial challenges, the tight resources, and the desire to publish content quicker than ever, all four panellists remained positive about the future of music journalism, and rejected the sometimes stated idea that the latter decades of the 20th century were some kind of golden age that has now passed.

“Working in music journalism is kind of unrecognisable even when I think of how things looked twelve months ago, five years ago, and when I started ten years ago”, said Cochrane. “But I think there will always be a desire in people to read great original content – and that is still out there if you look for it”.

Rejecting the idea that music journalism was better in the olden days, Savage argued: “I just read so much stuff that I love today. People talk about Lester Bangs a lot, as representing some kind of golden age, but if you’ve ever read Lester Bang’s journalism, it’s impenetrable. It’s not good writing in the way we understand it. Yes it’s impressionistic and arty, but it’s mostly nonsense, and I think of people like Tom Ewing, Dorian Lynskey, all of these guys here, Jude Rogers, Eve Barlow, people who when they write something I want to read it, no matter what they’re writing about”.

“Whether it’s an artist I care about, or an issue I care about, they generally turn out really fascinating, insightful articles about music and about the music industry”, he continued. “That’s why I’m optimistic about it and not just in print”.

Snapes added: “Ten, twelve years ago people used to say that blogging was going to destroy music journalism because it would democratise it and everybody would be able to do it. I don’t think that’s the way it has democratised it”. Which is to say, we’re not living in a world where everyone’s a music journalist, but the community of people who do write about music on a regular basis is a much more diverse bunch.

“I don’t think there was a golden age of music journalism, when you look back”, Snapes continued, picking up on Savage’s point. “I specifically had an experience with a Lester Bangs piece when Lou Reed died. I had to pull something out of the archives for NME and I found this Lester Bangs piece about him, and there were good parts in it, but it was full of rampant transphobia. The amount of good stuff that’s from that supposed golden age is really minimal”.

“When you look at music writing now, we’re seeing so much more writing from people of colour, people of different gender identities, different racial backgrounds”, she went on. “I think that is why we’re in a golden age of music journalism now”.

Though that’s not to say that the music media doesn’t have similar diversity issues to the music industry. There are a greater variety of voices than in the past, but the music journalist community could and should still be more diverse. Which brought the journalist panel to back where they started – in part one of our report – the fact that most music writers launch their careers by working for free.

“A lot of people can’t afford to”, Snapes said. “I have seen things to counteract that – there are great organisations that are helping to sponsor people if they can prove they are a great writer. But there is a long way to go still, and I think it’s going to get harder for people from impoverished backgrounds. That’s a shame for the entire music journalism industry, because we’re not going to hear such diversity of opinion”.

Though Savage offered some optimism, arguing that new channels are offering new opportunities to budding young journalists, and allowing a rise in video journalism. Referencing the grime scene, he said: “That whole generation live on YouTube and are making videos on YouTube. I think that that is where the next generation of journalists will come from”.

And that’s the next challenge for traditional music media too, Savage concluded, ie creating different kinds of content that work on the channels where younger consumers hang out. And that increasingly means audio and video content.

It’s a challenge Savage’s employer, the BBC, is trying to meet. “It’s strange” he said, “we’re a broadcast company. We’re in the business of making television and film, but we really have to think about how we engage in video on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, because that is not our natural home. The audiences don’t come to us anymore, we have to go to them. Our journalism is having to be refocused”.

“When I do a written piece now, I quite often do a film version that doesn’t go on the BBC website but lives on Facebook or another social channel”, he added. “I suspect that the next generation of great music journalists will probably start in that sphere”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, part one of a session from the Media Conference titled The Crisis In Music Journalism.

The challenges facing music media in the digital age were put under the spotlight during the CMU Insights Media Conference at The Great Escape this year, with both commercial and editorial perspectives on offer.

Leading the latter was a panel of four leading music journalists – Laura Snapes, Emily Jupp, Greg Cochrane and Mark Savage – who discussed the challenges of pursuing a career in music journalism today, as well as the role of the review in the streaming age and whether or not the golden age of music writing was now over.

Between them the panel have worked for numerous titles. Snapes has had roles at both NME and Pitchfork and now freelances. Jupp was Music Editor at The Independent and now also freelances. Cochrane previously worked for both the BBC and NME, and now writes for Loud And Quiet and other publications. And Savage is a music reporter with the BBC.

While for media owners the key challenge today is how to generate revenue around online music journalism, for individual journalists the challenge is how to build a sustainable career when there are so few full-time music editorial roles on offer. Not to mention the fact that, online in particular, a not insignificant amount of music editorial is actually the result of unpaid work, with journalists eager for an audience writing for free.

“I do think there needs to come a point where you start getting paid for it”, Snapes said, acknowledging that a lot of music journalists still produce at least some editorial for free. “And I don’t know how I feel about publications that solely subsist on free labour, especially if they’re pulling in money from advertising which isn’t trickling back down to the writers”.

Though, pretty much all music journalists admit, writing for free is how you get started. Jupp recalled the start of her career. While she had a paid role with newspaper The Independent, that was in social media. She wrote music content for the title for free in order to get her music journalism career off the ground. “I was doing it all for free”, she said. “And I was even taking holidays from my paid job in order to do it for free!”

But she agrees with Snapes that, while working for free is how you get started, budding music journalists have to get to a point where they push for payment. “After two years of not having a holiday, I sort of thought it was time for the paper to recognise my commitment”, she said of her own experience. She then managed to negotiate a wage for her music writing and subsequently became the paper’s Music Editor.

“I think if you do just write for free and you feel like you’re not getting anywhere with it, that’s time to negotiate getting paid”, she advised. “Because by that point, if you’ve proven yourself and done enough free work, the company should actually try to support you from that point. It did pay off for me eventually, but it was a struggle, and I don’t think there is a solution to that. It’s just a personal decision. If you feel like, ‘OK, I’ve got enough skills now to actually be paid for this’ that’s the time to demand a salary”.

Cochrane also began by writing about music for free, but equally felt that this provided the route to paid work. “I worked for free at the outset, but that was my chance to start building a portfolio so I could go to places like NME looking for paid work”, he said. “I could go to the places that I aspired to write for, to work for, with something to offer and a portfolio that exhibited my skills”.

Cochrane says he considers himself lucky because he found a paid job in music journalism fairly quickly, though he added that junior roles in music journalism aren’t actually that well paid. “When I first started working in music journalism, once I’d taken the cost of my train ticket from where I was travelling from into London and bought my lunch, I had about £10 left every day”, he said. “But I was 21 and I thought that was fine. That’s what I felt I had to do to get started”.

Some of those music writers writing for free aren’t necessarily providing that free content to others of course, ie they are publishing it themselves via a blog. Blogging about music is another great way to get started, the panel reckoned, and a blog can also give a music journalist who is being paid elsewhere a place where they can write more freely about a wider range of topics, and continue to build their own profile.

Savage got into writing about music by starting his own blog. “Really, that’s the only place I had to try to develop my own voice”, he said. “And then when I started pitching stuff on spec to the BBC entertainment team, I had a style that I was writing in by then – I think it’s hugely important for somebody who writes about entertainment to themselves be entertaining”.

Of course, with music media owners struggling to generate revenue, writing for free the classic way into a career in music journalism, and so many people aspiring to be music journalists, that could result in a culture where more and more music publications are relying on free content.

Does that make it ever harder for those reaching the ‘I ought to get paid now’ point in their career? Is it even ethical for publications to ask people to work for nothing? Snapes said that it depended on what the publication’s remit was, adding that she felt that there had been a shift in the last decade where some sites that began with an ethos of “team spirit, everybody mucking in together” had become more commercial operations but still don’t pay writers.

Although insisting that “I really don’t want to sound like one of those old men that bangs on about why people shouldn’t work for free”, Snapes seemed to suggest that freelance journalists eager to reach an audience should nevertheless consider the commercial set-up at a publication before committing to work for free, or for next to nothing.

“A friend told me recently that they had done a small feature for a big glossy fashion magazine, a really ‘proper’ looking one. I think they had to file about 1500 words and they got paid £30. You can see the fashion adverts that are in that magazine, and they add to a lot more than £30. I see discrepancies that I think are unaddressed”.

She added that too many publications relying on free labour could also have a negative impact on the quality of the music journalism. And even with those titles that do pay everyone, most music media now operate on such tight resources, there often isn’t the infrastructure in place to support a writer’s professional development.

“One real problem is that even on publications that do have a full paid staff – staffs these days are quite skeletal, because they haven’t got the resources to hire lots of people. And that means they haven’t got the resources to develop the most junior members of staff to eventually teach them more skills, so they can become more accomplished members of staff and take higher positions”.

All of the panel acknowledged that a big part of the problem is simply how hard it has become to make money out of music journalism, especially online, and that is a key reason for the skeletal staffs and reliance on unpaid work. In the recent CMU Insights music journalist survey, many of the writers surveyed said that subscriptions or simple banner advertising would be their preferred way of music media generating revenue, but most recognised that neither of these seemed like viable ways to stay in business today.

One possible solution is music media forming closer relations with consumer brands. Though how do the journalists feel about brands having an increased role in music journalism – as sponsors, or by working directly with artists, or by working with music publications to create so called branded content?

“I do find increasingly that I get offered interviews or content not by a PR for an artist but a PR for a brand that is taking that artist under their wing and therefore they want some kind of payback”, Savage noted. “Of course we can’t do that on the BBC, it’s even crazy to ask! But it’s clear to me that if we’re being offered that, then everybody is being offered that. I do wonder how far away you are from accepting that deal to then offering the brand copy approval and all of those sorts of things”.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, countered Cochrane: “My desire has always been to be a journalist and editor that upholds integrity, and that can be about finding a real a balanced spot when you are working with external clients that want to achieve a commercial goal. I do think there are ways of doing that. When I was working for the BBC, the idea of that might have horrified me a bit, but it can be done in a legitimate way”.

Snapes added: “By and large brand partnerships are made really obvious so you know it’s a sponsored post or advertorial – ‘in association with X’, that kind of thing. Media consumers today are incredibly media literate and they know what to expect, they know the bargain that is being upheld here. However, sometimes lines are crossed”.

“At the end of last year I wrote an article on the band The xx and I spent a number of days with them”, she continued. “I thought it was going to be a normal article the whole time, but when it came out, it said ‘sponsored by Mailchimp’ on the side. And I thought, ‘Well, I didn’t see any of that money! Who did?'”

“This piece was nothing to do with Mailchimp, The xx are nothing to do with MailChimp, I wonder if they even knew about it”, she went on. “It was very jarring to see that appear. Somebody else I know who did a piece about the 20th anniversary of ‘OK Computer’, that also happened to them and they were livid because the nature of ‘OK Computer’ was very anti that kind of thing. So I think when it’s foregrounded, people know what to expect, but when it’s sneaked in through the back door like that, it’s a bit more muddled”.

In part two of our report on ‘The Crisis In Music Journalism’ we find out what the panel felt about the role of the review in the streaming era, and whether or not the golden age of music journalism is now dead.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, we look at another of the sessions on addiction in the music community, and our interview with former Sleeper guitarist turned academic Jon Stewart.

Stewart became an alcoholic during the Britpop heyday of the 1990s and eventually found help through Alcoholics Anonymous. He then left that movement after fourteen years, now working to promote non-spiritual recovery alternatives, and is currently working on a PhD and book on this subject.

Speaking during the CMU Insights Drugs Conference, Stewart began by discussing the attitude to drugs within the Britpop community of the 1990s and where his problems with addiction began.

“During the 90s, there was certainly this idea of romanticising drugs”, he said. “My first highly addictive illegal substance was given to me by somebody at my record company, who’d just spent loads of money on my band and as a form of celebration went, ‘Here, have some of this stuff. This’ll make for a good night’. Where else would you do that? Where would you buy a house, and then re-route a local river underneath it? You just wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“In some ways, they were more innocent times”, he continued. “There was no meaningful guidance at all. Because people [in the industry] didn’t really know what to do. At the time, people knew about Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and those other groups, but no one would really direct you to those, you had to find them yourself. And it would be extremely uncool to go and do that. That’s changed now, which is good”.

Explaining how he ended up in AA himself, Stewart said: “The thing that led me to seek help was the same thing that leads any alcoholic or addict to seek help. It’s that you’re broken in your core. I went to a meeting and got help, I met a lot of nice people, some of whom had had much much bigger records than I had ever had with Sleeper. You know, we had one platinum album, at my first AA meeting there was a guy there who had seven. So that was pretty impressive. I realised I was no longer special and different. And that saved my life”.

With AA he eventually got sober, and also found God through the spiritual side of the organisation. Becoming something of an evangelist for the group – an “AA Taliban”, as he described it – Stewart attended meetings for fourteen years before deciding to leave, after questioning his faith and becoming and Atheist again.

“After fourteen years, I started to feel like I was in what seemed to be a cult”, he said. “Of course AA is not a cult, I want to be very clear about that. But it uses methods that parallel with the ‘thought reform’ methods that have been studied by sociologists. And they work, so AA uses that for good outcomes. I had a fairly spiritual sponsor who encouraged me to pray, so I did it and I had a spiritual experience as the result of working the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Which is the point”.

“I stopped going to AA meetings and started attending some CBT [Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy] groups instead, which were similar, but also different in some ways”, he continued. “I wanted a different kind of recovery based on real world experiences. So while I’m very supportive of AA – I really believe in it – but at the same time the narrative is that a lot of people leave it and move on and I wanted to understand that phenomenon”.

As part of his attempt to understand more about all of this, he wrote a blog post, which he has continued to expand upon as this has become a topic of more formal research. “I didn’t realise how much knowledge of addiction and our brain chemicals has changed [since AA started in the 1930s]”, he said. “You don’t hear about that in meetings, because you just talk about the twelve steps. You can’t openly promote or endorse other organisations”.

Moving on to what other help there is now available to music people tackling addiction, he said: “If you’re in any way a person of faith, or a spiritual person, just go to AA. It’s a wonderful place to go. If you’re a naturalist, who doesn’t believe in that, you need to look for other things, because AA’s a spiritual programme. And the first thing is this growing tenet of Atheist AA, which was birthed formally in Toronto about five years ago when the local intergroup tried to ban the meetings because they took God out of the twelve steps. God’s mentioned about five times in the twelve steps”.

“Then there’s a thing called SMART Recovery, which is CBT-based and also has meetings, which is growing”, he went on. “There are a few things that are impeding its growth, one of which is that you don’t talk about SMART Recovery if you go to AA. Also, if you watch the soap operas and the movies, all the directors and screenwriters and actors, they’re all sober in AA. And AA is a great drama. When will somebody in a soap opera or a movie get sober in SMART Recovery, where you sit around and do Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? It’s nowhere near as dramatic, but it’s really effective. And if you’re an atheist and you’re turned off by the God stuff, it’s a good place to go”.

Finally, Stewart discussed another option called The Sinclair Method. “It’s even more controversial, but has a maybe 75-80% success rate”, he said. “AA’s success rate is very difficult to judge, because everyone’s anonymous and every case is different, but it seems to be maybe 25%. Well, with the Sinclair Method, you don’t need to go to meetings, you don’t need to pray, and you take a medication that means you can keep drinking”.

“I think it’s a tragedy that Amy Winehouse drank herself to death and probably never heard anyone say, ‘you could try the Sinclair Method'”, he continued. “And the Sinclair Method has been in existence for 20 years. It’s a very effective programme”.

“You don’t even need to be abstinent to get there”, he added. “You take a pill an hour before you drink and it cuts off the massive surge in happy chemicals, and it allows people to control [their drinking]. And the other thing about it is that 25% of the people who take it become abstinent. So you could find abstinence through a programme that is not a programme of abstinence. About the same number of people who use the Sinclair Method find abstinence as go to AA”.

Stewart discussed other reasons why these other methods are not so well known, in addition to them not being portrayed in dramas. In part, he said, “it’s because of the way AA’s set up – a singleness of purpose that has allowed it to survive for 80 years. Think about what an incredible achievement that is. But that singleness of purpose has also meant that other newer forms of therapy and help that are so desperately needed haven’t really had the airtime that they deserve”.

GPs also generally aren’t aware of all or any of the options beyond AA, and sometimes not even AA itself. “If you’re lucky your GP will suggest AA”, he said. “The Sinclair Method is approved by NICE, and GPs still don’t know about it. It’s government approved”.

However, he said he was positive about the future of recovery, concluding: “The truth is, there’s never ever been a better time to get sober or seek help. And if you’re in a band, or managing a band where somebody has a problem, there’s never been a better time to find help. And you can multitask, you can do all of them. You can do AA, you can do SMART Recovery, you can do the Sinclair Method, and nobody can tell you that you can’t. It’s a very positive time in that respect”.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, we look at the final session of our Export Conference, A Beginners Guide To Brexit.

With export under the spotlight as part of CMU Insights @ The Great Escape this year, it was impossible to ignore bloody Brexit. Ian Moss – Director Of Public Affairs at record industry trade body BPI – led the debate, with Proper Music’s Vangel Vlaski, the Musicians’ Union’s Naomi Pohl, FAC’s Lucie Caswell and music export expert Anna Hildur among those considering the challenges Brexit poses the music industry.

“All the meetings I’ve gone to since the referendum have had Brexit on the agenda”, began the MU’s Naomi Pohl. “We’re totally obsessed with it, and it’s probably taken a lot of people away from doing more valuable work, frankly”.

A key topic at many of those Brexit discussions has been the future of copyright, she added, with concerns about what might happen to UK copyright law once it is cut free from the European copyright regime. “We are reassured again and again by the government and the Intellectual Property Office that there’s no planned overhaul of copyright [post-Brexit]”, said Pohl. “We hope that is indeed the case, because we believe the current copyright regime in the UK basically works well”.

Pohl added that she hoped the UK would continue to work closely with the EU on copyright matters post-Brexit, to keep our copyright system in tandem with that on the continent. Noting the current copyright review in the EU as part of the digital single market project, she noted: “There are various copyright changes that are planned at an EU level to make it easier for people to trade in the digital single market and we still want to be part of that”.

Beyond copyright law itself, what about British recorded music? It is assumed that there will still be a demand for UK artists across Europe and beyond, but could Brexit impact on how records are sold? Especially when it comes to physical product which – while still in decline – nevertheless continues to make up a decent slice of UK record industry revenues.

A lot of the CDs and vinyl records sold in the UK are actually pressed in Eastern Europe, while British labels need to get their physical stock into EU markets. If new tariffs or bureaucracy occur once the UK is outside the European Union, that will impact on the manufacture and distribution of all those discs.

“There are real concerns about how it will impact on the logistics of physical product”, said Proper Music’s Vangel Vlaski. “Things like manufacturing timelines are going to change. The cost of production is going to change. The free movement of goods and stock is going to change, and in a way that we can’t really predict right now. Our main clients – the labels – are concerned and we’re in constant discussion about the possible implications”.

Any increase in costs will hit smaller labels the hardest, he added, because they operate on tighter margins already. “Another implication is at retail”, he went on. “The faltering pound since last year’s referendum means it is already more difficult to import goods from the EU. Are we prepared to see the retail prices for music rise up?”

And could rising prices increase the decline in physical sales overall?

Away from recordings, what about live? For many artists, the prospect of new restrictions on being able to freely tour and play around the EU will likely be the single biggest concern. Pohl agreed: “You have musicians who freelance for different orchestras across Europe, who are crossing borders independently of any one orchestra, meaning there’s not somebody there to do any new paperwork that may be created when we leave the EU. That’s a concern”.

“And for bands who are touring”, she went on. “Especially grassroots bands who don’t necessarily have the support and finance behind them – could that be the extra cost that stops the tour from happening?”

Noting that many of the potential extra costs associated with making and selling music post-Brexit will hit grass roots artists and labels the hardest, the recently appointed CEO of the Featured Artists Coalition, Lucie Caswell, said that: “One of my fears for the wider business is very practical. You increase the administrative costs of making music, you increase the need for resources, and you actually reduce the pool of who can become involved in music”

“Does that then restrict the kind of music that you’re going to hear produced?”, she continued. “That’s a far more worrying prospect for me”.

With a wide range of concerns having been raised by his panel, BPI’s Ian Moss then asked, seeking a positive: “Are we being a bit pessimistic here? Is it possible that the great benefit of not being in the EU is that we’ll be in a country that is already a bit ahead of the curve on some key issues – like the anti-piracy injunctions and the duty of care of online intermediaries – and we might be able to take those initiatives further?”

Despite having raised a number of concerns herself earlier in the debate, Anna Hildur did agree that there was an exciting side to travelling into the unknown. “We’re living in an experiment”, she said. “Which is, in one way, a little bit exciting, even if we would like to avoid the uncomfortable side effects of that excitement sometimes”.

She went on: “It’s an experiment and I can see that maybe, all this pessimism is… maybe this will be the greatest country in Europe. ‘Make Britain Great Again’ and we can all be happy ever after”. Though achieving that for the music community will definitely require politicians – currently being lobbied hard by every sector – to tackle the various potential issues Brexit poses for musicians and their business partners.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, another of our interviews from the Media Conference looking at new business models in music media, this one with Vice’s Head Of Music Alex Hoffman.

As part of the CMU Insights Media Conference at The Great Escape this year, we looked at how a number of music media are surviving, and even thriving, in a difficult marketplace. As discussed in this CMU Trends article, making money from music media is challenging because print sales are – in the main – declining, while big audiences online don’t necessarily equate to decent revenues, because people expect online content for free and banner ad income is generally pretty modest unless you have tens of millions of readers.

Over the last decade or so, Vice has emerged as a major new media company. Initially a magazine, it has since grown massively online, and more recently moved into TV. The company also stages events and owns a number of venues. Music cuts across all of that, as Hoffman explained.

“It can be a bit confusing”, he admitted, running through Vice’s music activity. “Maybe the first thing to say is that Vice started [in 1994] in Canada, and it was more or less a punk zine when it started. It wasn’t just a music magazine, it was about culture, but it has always had a big music heritage”.

“Now, the main thing is Noisey – our music platform”, he continued. “Noisey started around six years ago. We also have Thump, which is for dance music, and we also cover music on the Vice site itself, usually in a more cultural way. And we have ID, which has been part of Vice for three or four years following an acquisition”.

Today, “video is front and centre” at Vice, Hoffman said. “It doesn’t seem such a crazy innovative thing now, but I guess it was”, he added of when Vice first moved into video, sometime before he joined the company. “When online video first started to take off, they really poured a lot of money into that. A lot of people thought ‘no one’s going to sit at a laptop and watch longer pieces, documentaries – that’ll never happen'”.

“I guess it was just a complete gamble”, he went on. “They were just like ‘what else is nobody doing? Let’s throw loads of money at making documentaries’. At that time, people weren’t watching [more long-form] stuff [online]. You might watch a couple of clips on YouTube but you weren’t sitting down and watching documentaries on the computer. So it was probably a mixture [of gamble and foresight]. They probably thought that this would be a good business model – but I’m sure they never expected it would be as big as it has been”.

A key part of Vice’s video strategy – and the firm’s wider business model – involves branded content, working with brands to create bespoke content for the Vice audience. For media, brand partnerships of this kind are generally more lucrative that old fashioned advertising and sponsorship. Again, Vice was something of a leader on this, though it’s a business model being adopted by numerous other media now.

The brand partnerships side of the business is run out of a marketing agency that sits within in the Vice empire. “We have Vice and then we have Virtue”, Hoffman said, introducing the agency side of the business. “They are pretty separate. Most of my focus is on the original editorial content, written and video. But at Virtue they’re talking to all the biggest brands in the world and having all sorts of conversations, finding different ways of doing things”.

How does it work when a brand decides it wants to collaborate with Vice on a music project? “We ask ‘does this idea sound decent'”, Hoffman explained. “‘Does the talent sound good, or have we got ideas that we could pitch to them?’ It varies – sometimes a brand comes with a really fully formed idea of what they want, or others time they’re coming to us simply because they want to reach what they see as ‘cool young people’. Normally they like the video stuff that we do and therefore think we can help them reach their target audience”.

“How it works is different every time”, he continued. “I wouldn’t be involved day to day, the agency people talk to the brand people and start setting something up, hear what they’ve got to say and concoct something. Then they’d come down to me and we’d start to work on it”.

A common criticism of branded content is that it allows brands to become directly involved in the creation of editorial, rather than simply placing a logo or advertising next to existing content. “We’re fortunate in that we’re not doing cheesy product placement things or endorsements”, Hoffman said of Vice’s various brand partnerships. “It’s mainly more documentary stuff”.

“Brands sometimes come with quite specific objectives”, he added. “For example, with Nandos, one of their things was they really wanted to bring South Africa into it, because they didn’t think enough people knew about their South African heritage”. That theme provided a solid steer for the content the two companies then collaborated on.

“Normally when I get involved, it’s because they want to talk talent”, he added. “So we’ll give them some talent suggestions. Then I might reach out to some people. [But generally] the editorial and the creative teams are pretty separate. A lot of the team I manage, they wouldn’t really get involved, and wouldn’t really know about it, apart from I might swing by their desk and be like ‘what do you guys think of this person as a host?’ or ‘who should we feature in this kind of documentary?'”.

Also, Hoffman insisted, branded content has to meet Vice’s quality standards. “It has to be a very high standard for us to put it out across our platforms”, he said. “And it needs to look like something that would have our name on it”. Though occasionally brands use Vice’s talents to create content for their own platforms. “We sometimes also do white label stuff”, he said. “People just like the way that we make things”.

Another benefit of getting brands involved in content projects is it provides bigger budgets, which means people featured in videos can get paid. “I see it as a positive that, sometimes when these brands deals come through, [it means] we have an opportunity to put some artists that we like into a video on our platforms that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to do otherwise. We wanna pay them. Artists should be getting paid – and the music publishers obviously expect more money when a brand’s involved – as they should”.

As well as its online platforms, Vice also now operates its own TV channels in various countries around the world, including the UK, offering a further outlet for its different types of content. “In the UK now, we have music shows on there that are not things that have been online already, that are specifically made for TV”, said Hoffman. “Not really the sort of traditional performance interview type things, it’s more documentary-based”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Our reports from all the key sessions at the CMU Insights conferences at last month’s The Great Escape return this week, kicking off today with the first of a number of CMU Trends articles based on the CMU Insights presentations that took place during the proceedings. Today, making money from music media in the digital age.

While the challenges faced by the music industry – and especially the record industry – since the mainstream adoption of the internet in the early 2000s have been widely documented, the music media – and especially the music press – has faced many of the same challenges too. While the web means music media are now routinely talking to more people than ever before, it remains challenging to generate income around that audience.

As the CMU Trends article explains, as mainstream consumers started to go online fifteen years ago, most media owners adopted this logic. “If we put our content online for free we should be able to build a massive audience. At some point internet advertising has to take off. And if we have a massive audience when that happens, we’ll be quids in. Plus, if we ultimately shift to an online-only business model, we’ll no longer have the costs of printing and distributing physical publications”.

The article goes on: “Most of the titles that did make decent quantities of content available for free online did start to see a good uptake for their output. And internet advertising did explode. However, what few media owners foresaw was just how much of the internet advertising dollar would go to search engines and social media, and especially the likes of Google and Facebook”.

That means that banner advertising alone rarely generates enough money to fund a music media business. Which means media owners must explore other possible revenue streams, including subscriptions, sponsorship, branded content, donations, affiliate commissions, spin-off products and events, brand licensing and becoming a marketing agency. Most media will need to succeed at more than one of those to have a viable business.

Premium CMU subscribers can access the full CMU Trends article here, which reviews those various revenue streams in more detail. It is the first of three CMU Trends articles based on the CMU Insights Media Conference at The Great Escape last month. Parts two and three will summarise the recent survey of UK music journalists under-taken by CMU Insights. To become a premium subscriber for just £5 a month click here.

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CMU’s Andy Malt and Chris Cooke review key events in music and the music business from the last week, including the upcoming General Election in the UK and what it might mean for music, a round-up of all the latest Prince legal news, and plans for Festival Republic to introduce facilities for ticketholders to test the safety of drugs at its events. The CMU Podcast is sponsored by 7digital.

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Look out for reports on all the key sessions at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape over the next few weeks. Plus, from next Monday, we’ll be publishing a series of CMU Trends reports providing more in depth versions of the insight presentations CMU Insights delivered during TGE this year – go premium to access CMU Trends. Today, we look at two UK funding initiatives that support new acts looking to build their audiences overseas, both of which were profiled at TGE last week.

There is no one-stop music export office in the UK, but there are a number of government and industry supported initiatives in this area. As part of the BPI-supported CMU Insights Export Conference at this year’s Great Escape, BPI’s Chris Tams and PRS Foundation’s Bhavesh Patel ran through two of the schemes that support artists and music companies looking to grow their businesses overseas.

Patel started by focussing on the PRS Foundation’s International Showcasing Fund. “This is the result of a partnership between different organisations across the UK music industry”, he explained. “Including Arts Council England, British Underground, PledgeMusic and the Department For International Trade”.

“We have nine different partners across the scheme and everybody collectively puts money into this fund” he added. “The job of the PRS Foundation is then to distribute that money across the industry to help bands and artists build their presence internationally. This involves supporting British acts playing showcase festivals like SXSW, Eurosonic or Reeperbahn – if bands have been invited to play any of those events, then we have grants available to support them in that activity”.

“We work closely with the top tier showcase festivals, so the main criteria for this fund is that you’ve got to have an invite to play one of these festivals directly from the organisers”, he explained. “That’s an initial filtering process. We trust the judgement of a lot of these showcasing festivals, and that invite is the first step to applying for funding”.

Artists also have to demonstrate to the PRS Foundation that they are “export ready”, he added. “If you can show that domestically there is demand for your music, and that there is some interest, say from the local industry, in the other market you plan to play, then that means you have a strong case that can help you get the funding from us”.

Artists who have received International Showcasing Fund funding this year include Dream Wife, to play SXSW, and Anna Meredith, to perform at Eurosonic. In total, between 60 and 80 artists receive this funding per year.

Tams focussed on the Music Export Growth Scheme, which the BPI runs on behalf of the government’s Department Of International Trade. Since launching in January 2014 the scheme has handed over £1.85 million to 131 artists.

“It’s a matched funding scheme”, explained Tams. “MEGS puts 70% in and then the artist, the label, or whoever applies, has to put 30% in. It’s a grant, so you don’t need to repay it, and it’s basically open to anyone who’s a UK-based ‘SME’ – so less than 250 employees or a turnover of less than £50 million”.

“Those SMEs can be labels, artists, management companies, tour agents, promoters, anyone”, he continued. “Roughly about 94% of all the money we’ve given out so far has been given to artists that are working with independent labels”.

With regard to the application process, Tams admits: “It’s fairly laborious process – we make it difficult on purpose, because we want people who have actually got a sound business case. Whereas a lot of funding schemes are based on how great the artist is, we’re more commercially focused, we are looking to back sound business cases. We’re looking at whether or not we think the project will succeed”.

The government provides the funding in order to help grow the UK music industry’s exports, contributing back to the country’s economic growth. “Hence it’s called ‘Music Export Growth Scheme'”, Tams joked. “It’s not the ‘Music Export Go-away-and-have-a-lovely-time-at-SXSW Scheme'”.

Of the expected return, he continued: “We’re looking at, on average, about 10:1 return on investment that we give you. If we give you £10,000 to go on tour somewhere, we want to see at least £100,000 come back to that artist’s business. More than that, if possible”.

“It’s very competitive”, he added of the demand for the funding. “Last round, we had £150,000 to distribute, but we had applications totalling £2.3 million. Those applications come from a diverse range of genres – and for projects involving artists from many different backgrounds. But we don’t have no quotas on genres, or anything like that, projects are selected purely on merit, those that we think are most likely to succeed”.

So what does MEGS specifically fund? “Overseas music-based projects where we can add value and make the difference between a plan happening or not happening. The funding can cover digital marketing, press and PR, promotion, tour support, including the costs of session musicians, travel, per diems, visas. We like projects to be creative and innovative”.

“The applications that really stand out are the ones that are slightly different”, he said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of applications for bands to go and play the same four gigs in America, or the same fifteen gigs in Germany. If you have an application that’s slightly different in any way shape or form, you do tend to stand out”.

“We don’t particularly cover the costs of performing at international showcases, because that’s already covered by PRS Foundation fund”, he added. “But we will fund things like SXSW if it is part of a broader activity. If you do a fifteen date US tour and SXSW is one of your dates, we might be able to fund that. But we have a constant dialogue with PRSF, because you’re not allowed to get public funding for the same thing twice”.

Both panellists then offered tips for filling out funding applications. “It differs for each fund”, said Tams. “We’re looking for you to answer the specific questions on the form. The amount of people that don’t actually answer the questions is unbelievable”.

“There’s an old phrase ‘bullshit baffles brains'”, he continued. “Don’t waffle on. If you have two pertinent points to put over in an application, then just put those two. You don’t need to fill the form up with erroneous details. Certainly for us at MEGS, we’re looking for bands that are going to give us a good return on investment. We’re not a cultural fund. We’re not an arts fund. We are a business fund. We’re looking for a business case. If you are applying for arts funds then you need to tailor your application differently for that”.

Patel said that a lot of that advice applies to the PRSF showcasing fund too. Plus, he repeated, demonstrating some interest for the artist in the country where they are heading is also key. That may be media support or industry interest. “You need to generate that interest from the industry out there”, he went on. “They really have to want to see your band over at SXSW, or Eurosonic, or whichever event is it you’ve been invited to play. Demonstrating that builds a stronger case and foundation for your application”.

Asked about a good case study of a band who had received MEGS funding, Tams picked the Temperance Movement, who had already been discussed in the Export Conference by Phil Middleton from their management firm ATC. “Due to the MEGS funding, they got seen by a tour promoter in Germany”, said Tams. “That promoter then put them on at some Rolling Stones gigs, which gave them a six-figure PRS cheque at the end of the shows. That was a great return for us as a scheme, and obviously a great pay off for the band as well”.

“We have a fairly rigorous reporting structure for those who receive funding to meet”, he added. “We are constantly asked for updates from the government about what the return on investment has been. Since 2014 we’ve probably had about a 10.5-11:1 ROI on all the money we’ve handed out via the fund”.

“Those results don’t come over night”, noted Patel on how you assess the impact of funding. “We’re not expecting bands to go and play whichever festival and then come back the week after and tell us they’ve been offered a tour to go back. Sometimes it takes a year or two to really see the results of doing that show”.

Look out for reports on all the key sessions at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape over the next few weeks. Plus, from next Monday, we’ll be publishing a series of CMU Trends reports providing more in depth versions of the insight presentations CMU Insights delivered during TGE this year – go premium to access CMU Trends. Today, we look at the first of a series of sessions on addiction in the music community, and our interview with musician and writer Simon Mason.

Mason is the author of ‘Too High, Too Far, Too Soon’, a book about his experiences within the 1990s Britpop scene. Already addicted to drugs by the time he entered that world, Mason soon became a drug dealer to several bands within it, finding himself on tour with them in order to procure supplies. Now clean, more recently he has toured with bands, including The Libertines on their reunion tour, to help keep them off the drugs.

Speaking during the CMU Insights Drugs Conference, Mason began by describing how he became involved in the Britpop scene in the first place. “I became immersed in that cultural phenomenon as someone who thought they were a musician, who wanted to be a musician, but was actually a drug addict”, he said.

“My entry into the world of backstage, and that kind of stuff, was via Glastonbury and other festivals”, he continued. “Prior to Britpop I’d managed to get a job for an organisation that I’d better not mention. It involved having an access all areas pass and joining the dots between what people were looking for backstage but were unable or effectively too scared to go looking for outside the confines of the backstage”.

He routinely found himself being asked to find drugs, and as a drug user himself he knew where to get them. “I became the guy that knew the guy”, he said. “And then I became the guy”.

Of his view of that time, and whether he felt he was doing harm by providing the drugs, he explained: “I was a drug dealer and a drug addict, and I didn’t choose to see any damage. I saw and heard incredible music being made, incredible performances. I saw a lot of people having a really good time. Part of that was staying awake for a long time, sitting around in fields, or at festivals, or at gigs. And at the time generally feeling like we were a tribe, a disparate tribe. Electronic music and indie music – it didn’t matter anymore. It became this big melting pot, and part of what was melting in the pot was a lot of drugs”.

“There was a darker underbelly to that though”, he admits. “No one had previously taken drugs on the scale of what we were taking at that point. What happened in the late 80s and 90s was unprecedented and probably still is. It happened on an industrial scale. It became really easy to hide in that industry”.

As he became ever more involved, he missed the warning signs. “I remember coming back off tour with a band that I’d been ‘helping’ for three weeks and I got home and I collapsed”, he recalled. His GP advised him to rest. “I said: ‘Why would I want to do that when I’ve got another tour to go on?’ It didn’t occur to me that how I was living my life was damaging. It just seemed like what everyone was doing”.

Eventually Mason became addicted to heroin, which he discovered was frowned upon even by many in the music scene at the time. “I was at Knebworth for that legendary Oasis gig”, he said. “I arrived there and I soon discovered that I had left my stash of heroin back in London. So, I needed to trawl through the backstage area trying to find someone that I knew that had a heroin habit. Instead, I was met with this sea of disgust from people”.

“I had all these people with cocaine falling out of their nose at Knebworth talking absolute shit to each other, calling me a junkie”, he went on. “And I’m thinking ‘hang on’, even in my own drug-addled state, I knew there was a discrepancy there, there was some sort of duality, hypocrisy. But of course I paid no attention to it”.

Nonetheless, his position as a celebrity drug dealer quickly started to slip. “By 1997, I was homeless, I was living on the street. The phone had stopped ringing. All those wonderful people that I’d always known weren’t really my mates but used to come and visit my house a lot because they wanted drugs – guess what? – they weren’t there anymore”.

It took time, and a number of attempts, to overcome his own addiction challenges, but Mason has now been clean for more than ten years, and in 2013 published the memoir about his experiences in the music industry.

“People say ‘it must have been really cathartic [to write the book]'”, he said. “The honest truth is that I don’t think it was cathartic. I’d sat in enough self-help groups and been to rehab seven times. I’d been through that process. The truth was that, it’s a good story. Someone had read some of the ramblings that went on to become this book and they said, ‘You’ve got a voice and this needs to be heard because ultimately it’s a story of hope'”.

“Sadly the perception of addiction and musicians is quite warped”, he continued. “There’s a lot of disinformation flying about. The public perception of alcoholics and drug addicts is that you’re always going to be one and you’re never going to sort it out. I don’t know how but I survived and there’s a message of hope at the end [of my story]. I’d like to think it’s not prescriptive. I don’t tell people how to recover, I just talk about my experience”.

After it had been published, Mason said he began to start receiving messages from people who told him the book had helped them. “The best one I got was: ‘You don’t know who I am, you’ll never meet me, I just wanna let you know that if someone as fucked up as you can get clean then anyone can, thanks!'”

Soon, he began getting requests to work with musicians who were struggling with addiction, in something a turnaround from his former involvement in the music community. This, he believes, was partly the result of music industry veterans reading the book because they were worried that they might be mentioned in it.

“Everyone’s fear was that this was some sort of shabby kiss and tell footballer’s wives book”, he said. “And it’s nothing of the sort. So I think a lot of people read it out of curiosity. Some of those people are still in management and they’re still managing artists that have problems. So I got asked to go and meet some musicians, fairly high profile ones, to see if I could help them”.

Of his approach to this work, he explained: “For me personally, I’ve always found the most potent source of help is to be shown how to live differently, rather than just being told how to live differently. By living differently, I mean living with some sobriety, or not smoking crack all day, or drinking. That’s kind of what happened”.

“I’ve got varying degrees of success with the people I helped who were already at a point where they were ready to change some of their behaviour”, he added. “Not so much success with the people that felt that I’d been imposed upon them by their management and who couldn’t wait for me to just piss off and leave them alone”.

Still, his experiences give him a better insight to offer that help when someone is ready for it, he said. “If there’s a better example of poacher turned gamekeeper, I’d like to hear it. Because I understand. I understand the music industry from top to bottom. I understand addiction from top to bottom. I was a using addict for 20 years. At the end of this month I’ll be eleven years clean and sober. I get it. And I like helping people”.

The other result of his recovery is that Mason has returned to music, and begun to find some success with it. Initially he formed a band called The Should Be Deads with a number of other people he was in a twelve-step programme with, performing covers at charity shows.

“We rolled that for about seven years, and it was great, fantastic”, he said. “But I realised that it wasn’t quite scratching the itch for me creatively. I came off a job with a band I was on tour with, The Libertines, last year, and Peter [Doherty] very kindly said: ‘Look, why don’t you open the show for me on this solo tour, read some of your book, play some of your songs?'”

That resulted in Mason gaining a record deal and forming his new band The Hightown Pirates. “That sort of fairy tale stuff that I thought I wanted back in my days of being a drug addict never happened back then”, he said. “And if it had happened [and the money had flowed in] I’d have been dead. I did a pretty good job of killing myself on the giro. So thank the universe that it didn’t happen then”.

“I was one of those people who believed that creativity only came from being under the influence of something”, he went on. “But my experience is that, with the album we’ve just made, and the shows that we’ve just started doing, they just could not have happened when I was taking drugs. It’s kind of like ‘Si And The Family Unstoned’. We’ve made this album and from the early reviews – people have said it sounds full of joy. We’ve got a horn section, it’s this massive sounding thing, and it’s the sound of redemption. It’s the sound of hope”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here. The Hightown Pirates’ debut album ‘Dry And High’ is released on 16 Jun. Find out more about the band here.

Look out for reports on all the key sessions at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape over the next few weeks. Plus, from next Monday, we’ll be publishing a series of CMU Trends reports providing more in depth versions of the insight presentations CMU Insights delivered during TGE this year – go premium to access CMU Trends. Today, the first of a series of interviews looking at new business models in music media, this one with DJ Mag’s Martin Carvell.

As part of the CMU Insights Media Conference at The Great Escape this year, we looked at how a number of music media are surviving, and even thriving, in a difficult marketplace. Making money from music media is challenging because print sales are – in the main – declining, while big audiences online don’t necessarily equate to decent revenues, because people expect online content for free and banner ad income is generally pretty modest unless you have tens of millions of readers.

One of the titles that has managed to thrive is DJ Mag. It’s MD Martin Carvell discussed buying the struggling dance music title from Future Publishing in 2006 with his business partner James Robertson, and then expanding the publication beyond the print title – and beyond the UK – in order to ensure the media brand’s survival.

“When we bought DJ Mag in 2006, the landscape was becoming very challenging and the magazine had been through a series of traditional publishers in the preceding years”, he said. “It was with Future before we bought it, but it had been through Highbury, it had been through Nexus, and when it got to Future, they didn’t really know what to do with it. It was full of very old school dance music journalists”.

On how he and Robertson, as Thrust Publishing, came to own the magazine, he explained: “We literally used to write to whoever owned it at any one time saying ‘can we buy it?’ Eventually, Future wrote back and said ‘yes, you can’. We made them an offer and bought it. At the time it was not doing very well, and a lot of other dance music publications had recently gone out of business, or were struggling”.

However, despite that, “we always felt that the brand of DJ Mag was very strong and hadn’t really been fully exploited or explored. So we saw an opportunity to take it forward again”.

Turning the magazine around involved creating new products around the DJ Mag brand, and building on the title’s existing and popular Top 100 DJs poll – in part by launching other awards like the Top 100 Clubs Poll, the DJ Mag Tech Awards and the Best Of British Awards – all of which bring in revenue, but also enhance the magazine’s global reputation. Which has proven key to growing the business.

Though the print magazine – actually two print titles, Thrust directly publishes a UK and US edition – is still at the core of the operation, and still delivers for the business. “We still generate a lot of our revenue through print advertising”, noted Carvell. “We’re reasonably niche in terms of the content we put out, but that means we still have a very loyal readership”. And there are still a number of companies – especially in the music tech space – which want to reach that readership, and which recognise that traditional advertising within DJ Mag is still a very effective channel to do so.

Though the print edition is also about getting the DJ Mag brand out there, so to boost all the other things the company now does. “We print up tens of thousands of extra copies and distribute them at key events like ADE or Miami Music Week”, Carvell continued. “In those scenarios, the print magazine is also about showing the world that we’re still here and this is what we’re doing. It’s definitely our calling card”.

DJ Mag’s global reputation has proven lucrative for the business via a number of licensing deals, where other music or media companies buy the rights to use the brand in their home countries. “It’s very simple”, he says of these deals. “People pay us a license fee and then they get to use our content and they get to use our brand in their territory. It’s nothing more complex than that”.

“The licensees have to do a few simple things”, he continues. “They have to operate a website, they have to cover our flagship products – Top 100 DJs, Top 100 Clubs – [and] they have to print [the editions of the magazine related to those events]. So two magazines a year. Apart from that, we take a stand-off approach to managing them, other than just being in contact and talking them through anything they need to know”.

How many of these licensing deals are now in place? “Loads”, says Carvell. “The whole of Latin America, Spanish-speaking under one licence. One in Brazil. Mexico. We run North America. In Europe we have licensees in Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Germany. There’s a new one coming out for the Middle East. Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan. And China is our new big one”.

Prior to Carvell and Robertson taking on the DJ Mag title, there were no licensing deals in place at all, he added. “We started doing a few in Eastern Europe to start with, then the rest of Europe, then it moved on from there”.

“People tend to come to us, or it’s people that we work with, or who are involved with within dance music, not necessarily always within publishing”, he said of who typically comes to them to license the DJ Mag brand. “It fits in with what they’re doing. We don’t massively pitch it. I’m not travelling round the world going to a million conferences and pitching it per se. But we are out and about so people get to see us and people get to discuss it”.

“Things like the Top 100 DJs have definitely helped [to grow this side of the business]”, he added. “The profile of the poll has definitely helped us reach audiences in different territories; for a lot of people their first experience of DJ Mag will be their favourite DJ asking them to vote for them. That has definitely expanded our audience and given us the international reach, and the credibility and the heritage in different markets without us having actually been active there”.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

Look out for reports on all the key sessions at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape over the next few weeks. Plus, from next Monday, we’ll be publishing a series of CMU Trends reports providing more in depth versions of the insight presentations CMU Insights delivered during TGE this year – go premium to access CMU Trends. Today, visa tips from our Export Conference.

As part of the BPI-supported CMU Insights Export Conference at this year’s Great Escape, the founder of entertainment industry visa and immigration services company Viva La Visa, Andy Corrigan, presented a session on the top five visa mistakes commonly made by musicians before heading out to perform internationally.

Visas for musicians have been in the news a lot this year of course, after numerous artists found themselves turned away from the US border as they travelled into the country to perform at SXSW, amid confusion over what kind of American visa you actually need to play at the big showcasing event.

Though artists getting stuck at international borders facing visa issues is nothing new. Here are Corrigan’s top five tips to greatly reduce the chances of that happening to your artists as they go global.

1. Don’t leave it too late
The most common problem we encounter is artists simply not allowing sufficient time to properly process all the visas they need.

It’s difficult, we know, because while the bigger artists plan their tours a long time in advance, for smaller artists offers can come in late in the day. But one of the major problems we have to tackle is a lack of planning on the artist’s side.

Sometimes artists will look online and see information about different visas that says this element of the process takes this many days, this element this many days, and then they add that together and assume that’s all the time they need.

But that doesn’t take into account the delays which can often occur. And people routinely underestimate the time needed at the top end, before anything is submitted, getting all the information and documentation together for a visa. Things take longer than you expect, and rush jobs end up costing more.

2. Don’t get the wrong visa
This was the issue that caused problems around SXSW this year. There used to be an opinion, in part communicated by SXSW itself, that people coming from overseas to only play official showcases didn’t require a work visa, and could travel into the US on either an ESTA or a visitor’s visa.

This had mainly worked for the last four years. SXSW produced a letter that said, “this person has been invited to perform at this private showcase – allow them to enter”, and the authorities usually did. But this year that didn’t always work, and we saw people’s ESTAs being revoked, sometimes mid-flight, or before they travelled.

This raises the question, what visa do you need for the US? Our conclusion at the moment is that you should always get a work visa to be on the safe side. That applies to whatever type of performances you’re doing. Remember, the previous system was based on an opinion rather than an edict from the American government, and it doesn’t seem to work now.

The ultimate decision over whether or not you are allowed into the country to play is down to the official you meet on the border. If they think you’re coming in to work and you’re on a visitor’s visa, they will Google you and see if you have any dates booked. If they refuse you entry, you get turned around and sent home, plus you’ll find it more difficult in the future to get a visa. And you won’t be able to travel on an ESTA again.

Other territories have different categories of visa as well.

China does, and these are slightly grey areas. The norm is to go in on business visas, rather than work visas, because things are still in a state of flux in China. But you still have to know what your visa entitles you to do, in case you’re questioned. In India, if you apply for a media visa – or anything that’s perceived to be a media visa – it will get held up an extra two weeks, so often people travel to India on business visas.

Basically, you need to be really clear on what you’re going to be doing when you are in any one country and what your visa allows you to do.

3. Don’t lie on the form
This mainly applies to America as well. In American immigration law, they set great store by misrepresentation.

If you’re ineligible to enter the US for some reason – say, because of a criminal record – it can be a grey area, because it depends on whether the crime that you’ve committed is sufficiently serious. However, misrepresentation – lying – is a very clear cut offence. And so they can say, if you misrepresent anything on any visa application, then you’re inadmissible. It’s really simple. And it happens a lot.

We know from practical experience that when people are questioned at the border, they’re much more likely to be looked kindly upon if they answer truthfully and appear to be open. And we always advise applicants that when they go for their visa interview at the US embassy to be as open and straightforward and honest as they possibly can be, and appear to be so too.

If you have any criminal convictions, there’s a process you need to go through, by which you get a UK police certificate which outlines your convictions. You take that with you to the visa interview. They’ll say you’re inadmissible because of the criminal record, but in US visa law there’s what’s known as a waiver.

So, for every conviction there’s a direct waiver to counter it, to say that you can be admitted. That process takes longer – typically six months for the State Department to adjudicate – though once you’ve done it the first time, in theory subsequent visa applications should be quicker.

4. Don’t forget that rules can change
Rules change, and one of our jobs as a visa company is to keep up to date with all the changes in both the rules and any interpretations of those rules. And it’s not easy, because the relevant authorities don’t necessarily have PR departments – they don’t always tell you everything.

For instance, there has been a change for UK passport holders travelling to Canada, in that they’ve now introduced an ESTA-type system – an electronic visa. You fill in a form online, and one of the questions on the form is ‘have you committed any offences?’, so you have the same situation as America.

If you put ‘no’ and they find out that you have, then you’ll be thrown out. If you put ‘yes’, then you’ll be inadmissible to Canada and you’ll require a waiver, which takes several weeks. That potentially puts people who haven’t had problems playing in Canada in the past into a situation where now they will.

5. Don’t forget to budget for visa costs
You can do most visa processing by yourself, but generally people find it helpful to use an expert. In terms of budgeting, I think it’s good to speak to a visa company early on, and a good one should give you an idea of how to budget for your entire immigration costs.

Typically, we’ll have clients who come to us for a whole world tour. At the moment we’re doing Ed Sheeran, and they came to us before the start of the tour to talk about immigration and visas for the next two years. We had a meeting and talked through figures, in the same way they would for their sound supplier, and lighting, staging… all the other tour supplies. It’s a cost, like every other tour cost.

It can be made cheaper if you allow more time. But to be honest, American work visas are expensive for a new emerging act. It’s going to be at least £3000 or £4000 by the time you get to the US, and that’s a significant amount of money. But that’s the way it is. The UK music industry is lobbying to try to change it – the Musicians’ Union and ourselves and other organisations are trying to get it more cost effective – but at the moment we’re stuck with it, and it’s not a very high priority for the US government.

An artist’s touring contract might state that all immigration costs are borne by the promoter. Particularly if you’re going to, say, South Korea, that would probably be the case, or Australia for something one-off. But America, not so much, because trips to the US tend to be longer and you tend to be contracting with more than one promoter, and probably many. So sometimes it works to put immigration costs in the promoter contract, sometimes it doesn’t, but it is definitely worth considering.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here. Find out more about Viva La Visa here.

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